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How To...Build Rudder Pedals

By Bruce May (27 April 2006)

First, I want to encourage people to try rudder pedals as a
project. It was easy, fun and has enhanced my enjoyment of flight
simulator beyond belief. Rudder pedals rock!

Second, I have come up with a brake pedal improvement worth
sharing.

My Experience

It was surprisingly easy (and fun) to make rudder pedals. With a
little ambition, some ingenuity and some quality workshop time you
too can do this. All the information here is yours to use - have
fun!

Read every article you can find on how to make rudder pedals.
Every author has something to share and they all have great ideas
to help you with your project. The design you see here is the
amalgamation and extrapolation of a lot of good ideas. There has
been one base and three sets of pedals over two years, each one an
evolution of the previous.

Make lots of mock-ups from wood, cereal box cardboard, etc. This
really helps visualize things and helps you figure out what will
work and how things interact.

Be prepared to send the whole thing back to the drawing board if
it needs refinement. By refining and reworking your design you will
end up with a finished product which will work well, will make
flying more fun (remember fun is the objective here) and will be
something you will be proud of.

Safety

Be careful. Workshop safety is important. Use all tools carefully
and follow all safety precautions for each tool.

Tackle this project only if you are capable of doing it. If you
are not sure then go do some more research - get the advice and
help you need.

Another safety note, be sure follow all safety precautions when
soldering. Burns are not fun.

Remember I am not responsible for any problems, injuries or PC
damage you encounter...

Pedals side

Rudder link detail

Materials

The goal was always to keep the project inexpensive and to use as
much "off the shelf" hardware as possible (i.e. all the bits and
pieces are commonly found in most hardware stores). Everything I
used (including the joystick) was cheap, easy to find and will,
eventually, be easy to replace. Some of the parts have hundreds of
hours use and have gone though several revisions over two years
with no signs of wear.

Most of the wood parts are cut from 1" X 10" pine. The cams were
cut from a piece of poplar (a denser wood to hold the screws). The
base is 1/2 inch plywood (20 inches square) (3/4 inch particle
board also works well).

Metal brackets are all just common braces and corner brackets
from the hardware store. Some larger metal parts were cut from 24
gauge sheet metal.

The only major expense (if you can call it that) was an
inexpensive USB joystick ($15.00). A Saitek ST 50 joystick was
taken apart for the circuit board. This was used for the inputs.
USB means no fiddling about with the game port.

The pots were purchased from a local electronics store for $2.00
each. The resistance value was matched to ones from the joystick
(100k linear).

All the other bits and pieces were made up out of things lying
around the workshop along with a few screws and bolts from the
hardware store.

Circuit board

Pedals rear

Electrical

The three pots which were used for X, Y and throttle inside the
joystick were disconnected from the circuit board (make note of
where each wire goes) and new pots were wired in.

One pushbutton was added. This is needed when calibrating the
joystick. You could also add more if you want to program them for
other functions in FS.

Note: all three pot inputs on the circuit board need a pot
connected to them (even if you are using only one of them). If you
are not adding toe brakes then wire the other two pots in anyway.
Otherwise the board may give you unpredictable results.

The USB joystick makes connecting easy. Windows will detect it
as a joystick but FS knows better. FS can be configured to assign
each joystick axis to a specific function. More on this later.

Parts

Pedal pin detail

Pedal rear

Trial And Error

The first step of the project was to try the just gutted joystick
and the pots in FS. I was able to assign functions to it and make
things happen. This was perfect - off to the workshop to make
pedals...

Rudder Control

The first set of pedals was built for just rudder control. The
design was loosely based on Bill
Spencer's design for rudder pedals (thanks Bill) and evolved as
I started to create from the materials I had at hand. The base
mechanism described below has not changed since the first design.

The rails for the pedals are made from 3/4 inch square pine. The
bottom of each pedal has a 1/4 inch shoulder so that they sit on
and are guided by the rails. Rub a little candle wax on the rails
to help them slide. Be careful! Too much wax will make them sticky.
Note that the rails shown in the picture have a shoulder cut in
them - this has since been eliminated to match the drawing.

The pedals are linked to an aluminum cross bar. I chose aluminum
because it can be cut and modified with less effort than steel. The
bar is held up in the center by a long bolt. The two lower nuts set
the height of the bar and are jammed together to prevent them from
moving. The upper two nuts hold the bar in place and are also
jammed together. A little space is left between the pairs on nuts
to allow the bar to move.

The pedals have a bolt, which goes up into the aluminum bar. As
the pedals slide they move the bar. I used two small pieces of
metal tube around the bolt on each pedal. The inner one acts as a
bushing to prevent wear. The outer one holds the bar up.

Note: Any bolt which acts as a pin will cause a lot of wear. Use
metal tube around bolt threads to act as a bushing to prevent
this.

An extension arm on the bar is connected as part of a link to a
pot. This converts the motion of the bar to rotation of the pot.
The pot was originally out behind the bar but the linkage took up
space. The solution was to turn the bottom half of it around and
place it below the top half. Now it is out of the way (and the cat
does not try to attack it). Note that there is a small bushing here
too so as to avoid wear.

The pedals looked very much the same as they are today but the
pedals were fixed (did not rotate).

You can stop here with just rudder control if you like, or dive
right in and add toe brakes.

Toe Brakes (Version 1)

This part was project number two. After feeling pretty good about
the first project I decided to tackle toe brakes. The whole works
went back to the bench for an upgrade.

I decided to work on my original fixed pedals and add a pivot
(rotation point). The pedals need to rotate close to the bottom.
This seems to work best for the ergonomics of flying a desk (i.e.
matches the rotation of your ankle). The corner brackets, which
were used as a pivot point on the bottom of the pedals, gave me
better results than a hinge because I was able to move the center
of rotation around until I was happy with it.

The link from pedal to pot is made up of simple materials. A
small corner bracket, a length of pipe hanger strap, a hand cut cam
to connect to the pot and a couple of screws all work together to
convert the motion of the pedal to rotation of the pot.

My first design used a spring underneath to pull the heels of
the pedals back down but there were two problems. The rotation was
wrong - the pedals were flat out (horizontal) for a full stop. Also
the spring was weak and there was no "feel" to the pedal. There
needed to be some real resistance when stepping on the brakes (the
brakes need to push back).

Brakes off

Brakes on

Toe Brakes (Version 2)

After a couple of months of test flying an idea hit me and the
whole thing went back to the workshop for a revision. The solution
was to have each pedal compress something of the right density so
that it felt real. The obvious choice was an ordinary kid's sponge
rubber ball. The pedals were re-worked to incorporate a ball
underneath. The pedal is assembled and then the ball is stuffed
underneath. Simple.

The pictures show how it was built and the drawings will allow
you to get dimensions to make your own.

Note that in the pictures there are two small shims under the
balls. This helped stiffen up the feel of the pedals. I have since
moved to bit larger size sponge balls.

Drawings

Dimensions for the whole rudder assembly and photos of the final
version of the pedals are included in here for your reference.
Sorry to all the metric people (after thirty years of trying my
hardware store and I are still not metric...).

Final Setup

Once all assembled you will need to do the following steps:

Calibrate this joystick in Windows.

Adjust sensitivities in FS.

Reverse any axis if needed.

By now, you have gone back and read all the other great articles
on rudder pedals. Some of these include good detailed directions on
calibrating so I will not include them here.